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Movie Review: “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”

Well, as much as I wanted this film adaptation to be a raving success, I came home last night angry and disappointed. To be fair, I’ve never been much of a Tim Burton fan, but I felt that his penchant for creepy cool tales would be fitting for the popular Ransom Riggs novel about a supernatural group of misfits.

Let’s start off with the few pros of the movie. I enjoyed the casting: Asa Butterfield as Jacob was a bit wooden and Eva Green was inappropriately young for the role of the elderly Miss Peregrine, but overall the actors worked well together. I even accepted the strange decision to cast Allison Janney as Dr. Golan, who then changes form into the villainous wight known as Barron, played by Samuel L. Jackson, as simply a change in creative direction to support diversity.

The special effects were also impressive, and it was fun to see all the children show off their peculiar powers. I also greatly appreciated how the hollowghasts came to life: they were the tentacled Slenderman-esque monsters that I imagined.

Unfortunately, that’s where my compliments end. All the world-building and character development that occurred in the first half of the film came crashing down as the plot veered off course.

Nothing about the last half of the movie adheres to the novel. This is because the studio is not likely to make any sequels. It dawned on me that when Jacob and friends actually rescue Miss Peregrine instead of watch in horror as Dr. Golan kidnaps her that there would be no cliffhanger ending. And when the logic of the time loop is altered so that Jacob’s grandfather lives, that’s when I literally threw my hands up in the air and gave up all hope for cinematic redemption.

This adaptation is a prime example of how insulting it is when Hollywood uses the original ideas of authors to make money, and yet spit in the faces of the fans who are so passionate about these stories.

It continues to boggle my mind why directors can’t just look at books as paint-by-numbers. All the hard work has been done; you just need to follow directions and fill in the colors. And yet, this task was clearly too difficult for Burton.

As soon as I learned in the trailer that Emma and Olive’s peculiarities had been swapped, I saw massive red flags but chose to remain optimistic. Now that I’ve seen the movie in its entirety, I can’t even recommend it to non-fans of Miss Peregrine. It’s a clumsy, nonsensical mess. All I can hope now is that my intuition is correct and Hollywood won’t be turning Riggs’ sequels into equally horrendous failures. Fingers crossed!

Ugh, how disappointing! I’d been really looking forward to seeing the movie, but it’s disheartening to know that so much was changed. I think I’ll probably still see it (I promised a friend), but it’s upsetting to know that a terrific book was turned into a not so terrific movie.